


Something Good

by renquise



Category: Gentleman Bastard Sequence - Scott Lynch
Genre: Cuddling, Lots of it, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-12
Packaged: 2017-12-05 02:01:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renquise/pseuds/renquise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean is well used to unfortunate drunken metaphors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Good

For all that they didn’t spend much time beyond the absolutely necessary at the Broken Towers rooms, Jean was familiar enough with the creak of cheap wood to know when Locke had come back, pulling him out of the familiar embrace of Korish romances.

“Jean! Yes, excellent, it’s good you’re here. Not that you would be elsewhere? But, yes.”

Jean marked his spot with a finger as he sat up on his bed and found Locke leaning against the doorframe. “Welcome back. How did it go?”

“Excellently. It was the social event of the season, and I was the belle of the ball,” Locke said, tugging at his multiple cravats. “I already said ‘excellent’, didn’t I? I’d hate to repeat myself. Let’s go with marvellously. Lots of tiny amuse-bouches in entertaining animal shapes and the wine to go with them.” 

He put one hand out to rest it on a piece of the minimal furniture that was evidently not quite where he expected it to be and staggered sideways as a result, though he almost managed to make it seem like a deliberate rhetorical flourish appropriate to the flamboyant fop he had been playing tonight. It was a simple job, by their standards, sitting neatly enough in the domain of the easy but entertaining; the equivalent of a street comedy, as Galdo had put it.

“Good to hear that little bear-shaped sandwiches are still in fashion. You couldn’t have watered the drinks? Or perhaps made a discreet offering to a nearby plant?” Jean said, raising an eyebrow. Locke was still working on the cravats, and Locke’s hands were too clever for it to be unwieldy, but it was evident enough for Jean.

Locke shrugged. “Nothing doing, I’m afraid. The venue was decidedly lacking in greenery. Fuck,” he continued, abandoning the cravats and hopping on one foot in an ill-fated attempt to get his boots and stockings off. 

“Did you manage to hook the mark before drinking the canals dry, at least?” 

“My friend, if he were any more hooked, I would have come back without an arm.” The boots had come off without incident, and Locke paused in tugging his arm out of the sleeve of his coat. “Because he’s so hooked that he’s eating my arm. Not because I’ve lost an arm to sharks or somesuch. I’m pretty sure we’re the sharks in this situation, unless I’ve gravely miscalculated, which makes the whole fishing thing a bit bizarre. Unless we just take the mark as a smaller fish. Do sharks fish or hunt?” 

“This metaphor is growing better and better by the second,” Jean said, balancing his book on his knee to watch Locke’s (eventual, hard-won) victory over his left sleeve. 

“Worry not, I’ll put it out of its misery. I shall leave you the privilege of composing an appropriate eulogy.” Finally, Locke folded his fine coat and draped it over Jean’s desk chair with a deliberate care that was no doubt part respect for the tools of their trade and part inebriated concentration. 

Jean snorted. “Here lies Locke’s drunken fishing shark metaphor. Unfortunate in life, slightly less so in death. Hopefully not to be resurrected, shambling and partly decayed, when another encounter with cheap wine rolls around. Also, come over here before you strangle yourself with your own cravat.”

Locke trained his face into grave lines, coming to stand beside Jean and tilting his chin up to allow him access to the cravats. “Hold me, Jean—I may weep, as befits a grieving father of a poor metaphor cut down in its prime, never given even given a chance to live, marry a well-shaped analogy, and have many fat figurative phrases.”

“The very essence of tragedy. I would suggest that you drown your sorrows in wine, but I think that would only result in the tribulations of yet more truly tortured turns of phrase.” 

Jean worked at the knots, his fingers brushing against Locke’s throat when the cravat came undone. He tugged the cravats away, and Locke’s bearing shed the remnants of his character, resettling once more into what was Locke, albeit a looser version than usual.

“Nice alliteration.”

“Thank you.”

“But honestly, you wouldn’t be so callous as to refuse me comfort in my grief,” Locke said, tipping forward onto Jean’s bed. It wasn’t a particularly large bed, so Locke naturally ended up half-draped across Jean’s stomach, knocking the book off Jean’s knee. “Budge over. I’m going to rest my no-doubt-soon-to-be-aching head here for a moment.”

“‘A moment’, hah. That is a sad, sad attempt at getting your foot in the door,” Jean said. He resisted all attempts at budging him without undue effort, though Locke still found a way to weasel himself onto Jean’s bed and under the covers. Jean grabbed at his bare ankle, prepared to quite happily yank him out of bed and onto the floor, but Locke squirmed out of his grip, settling between Jean and the wall with the ease of one well-accustomed to getting into tight spaces.

“Your room is just ten feet away, you know. Maybe twelve, depending on the weaving that results from the journey,” Jean said, once the scuffling had settled. 

Locke raised his head, looked at the door, and then let it thump back down onto the mattress. “It is. Deeply unfortunate, that.”

Jean sighed. Locke curled up under the light sheets, his bony knees pressing into Jean’s side, and grew quiet. 

It was a cool spring night, and there was a long time yet before the summer days where the hot stink of Camorr streets rose to the window, mingling at falselight with the cloying sweetness of flowerboxes, their trailing strands drooping heavily off windowsills; one more aspect of Camorr that was intolerable for tourists and bizarrely comforting for those who had grown up with its insistent press. Those nights, it was too far hot to consider even being in the same proximity as another human body, let alone in the same bed. They all slept in the temple in the summer as much as possible, the elderglass walls cool around them for all their gleam, even when the air was molasses-thick with heat. 

But it was still spring, and the press of Locke’s wine-warmed cheek against Jean’s arm wasn’t unpleasant. 

He could feel Locke’s breathing, the hair on his arm prickling at the soft gust of air. Locke had his hands curled in front of him, the way he usually slept, but his eyes were still open, and he was looking up at Jean. The glint of his eyes was sharp as ever, reflecting the golden light of the little alchemical globe that served Jean as a reading light. 

“You should probably start sleeping it off, before it starts catching up with you,” Jean offered. He had perhaps given up on having his bed entirely to himself, but in this case, the path of least resistance was probably the best option, though he would give no quarter on the matter of covers.

Locke didn’t say anything apart from a soft hum, neither agreeing or disagreeing—a rare occurrence, to the point where Jean wondered if he should be worried. Locke uncurled one of his hands from his chest, letting the back of his hand rest against Jean’s side. Jean raised an eyebrow at him. If this was a further gambit for more bed territory, Locke had another thing coming.

But Locke just flipped his hand around, his open palm riding the slow in-and-out of Jean’s breathing. 

“You know I’m not ticklish, Locke, so it’s not going to work,” Jean said. He didn’t know why he kept his voice low. The walls were thin, but no thinner than anywhere else in the neighbourhood, and anyone who couldn’t sleep through a few enthusiastic couplings and a sprinkling of murders was likely to have moved out of Camorr long ago.

“So suspicious,” Locke whispered back at last, smiling up at him, but not moving his hand. Jean was very conscious, all of a sudden, of Locke’s thumb and its slow shift as Jean breathed.

“I have the right to be, considering I’ve just surrendered a considerable part of my bed to a shoddily-assembled collection of bones and bad metaphors.”

“I am very well assembled, thank you. The jointures are just a bit looser than usual, that’s all.” With that pronouncement, Locke pushed his face into Jean’s side, the point of his nose digging into Jean’s ribs. “I am very drunk, Jean,” he said, with the particular wonderment of those deep in their cups. “Remind me to refrain from this from now on.”

“Noted.”

Jean had long lost his page, his book resting on his belly, and it was only natural to place his free arm around Locke’s back, where it rested comfortably, the curve of Locke’s spine a match down to the bone. Jean ran his fingers over the bumps of his spine, one-two-three-four and back again—such a skinny fucker, he heard himself saying under his breath, and felt, rather than heard, Locke’s answering snicker against his ribs. 

There was a swell of something stupidly fond in his chest, resting somewhere beneath his lungs and pushing against his insides, and Jean was no physiker, but he wondered, briefly, what organ was responsible for its warm weight.

It wasn’t a surprise, per se, when Locke wriggled up towards him and kissed him with quiet deliberateness. The press of Locke’s lips was soft and dry, the tips of his long fingers on the edge of Jean’s jaw, the touch light as a pursesnatcher’s. Jean kissed back and curled his hand around the back of Locke’s neck, his thumb tracing along the short-cropped hair at his nape—Jean had trimmed it the day before for his role, Calo and Galdo providing fashion commentary—and it was slow and warm and easy, so easy. 

Jean pulled away, because he was the one who kept Locke’s mouth from running off on him, always, though he put his fingers to Locke’s lips before letting them drop.

Locke gave him a crooked smile. “My terrible wine breath?”

“Horrendous,” Jean said, still far too softly.

“Mm,” Locke said, letting his chin come to rest against Jean’s chest. “Later, then.”

Once he closed his eyes, it was a matter of moments before Locke was already out cold; as always, he fell asleep quickly and woke up just as easily. Jean reached down to snag his book from where it had fallen to the floor, trying not to shift the mattress too much. The next morning, Jean was going to wake up very early and very cheerfully, and perhaps learn and acquire a suitably brassy musical instrument to greet the sunrise, because Locke would do no less than give him the same consideration, but for now, the night was still and quiet.

Keeping his arm around Locke made it hard to turn the pages when he propped the book up on his chest and tried to find his place once more, but he didn’t mind, somehow.


End file.
